BarreToelken, longtime director of the Utah State
University Folklore Program (1985- 2003), was born in 1935 to John and Sylvia Toelken in Enfield, in the QuabbinValley of western Massachusetts. He grew up in a large extended
family with strong traditions of singing, music, and material culture.

But
young Barre didn’t get to live out his youth in that place.
The town in which he was born was slated for demolition. Massachusetts
had exercised eminent domain and begun converting the QuabbinValley
into a reservoir for thirsty Bostonians. The impetus of “progress” won out over
the rights of the inhabitants, who were paid, they were told, fair market value
for their homes and businesses and were then forced to vacate. Some of Toelken’s oldest and memories are of entire houses
lumbering slowly by on enormous truck trailers, followed by their displaced
owners.

The
Toelken family was forced to move and they resettled
here and there in various towns before ending up in Springfield,
where Barre’s father found work as a machinist. Yet Springfield
would never truly feel as much like home as Enfield
in the once-picturesque but now inundated QuabbinValley.
Seeing a cold, uniform reservoir where his small but vibrant community had once
stood was critical in forever casting Toelken as a
cultural preservationist. Being uprooted at such an impressionable age affected
him deeply and may well have contributed to his profound understanding of
marginalized people’s sense of community and his own ever-evolving sense of
place. In fact, Toelken has sometimes said that after
death he would like to be cremated and his ashes cast upon the surface of the
reservoir so that Bostonians can eat (or drink) the dust of one of the many
people displaced by their incessant thirst. He did, however, manage to save the
door handle to the Enfield
church where the eighteenth-century Puritan minister and philosopher, Jonathan
Edwards, preached his famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

His
mother Sylvia played the piano, and the two of them spent long hours singing together.
He grew to love music and singing so much that he tested his mother’s stamina.
Whenever he saw her pick up a book, either to read to him or to enjoy for
herself, Barre would insist vehemently that she sing
him the text. Fairy tale or nursery rhyme, the text didn’t matter, but he would
bounce up and down and demand, “Sing! Sing it to me!” She usually obliged and
perhaps unwittingly fostered his interest in ballads and folksongs; she later
remarked how he somehow had always
equated words with song or tune. In short, he was a natural-born ballad scholar
who eventually became a fine ballad singer in his own right.

His
imagination, too, seemingly began to effloresce in new and interesting ways.
One afternoon, as Barre’s mother was working in the
kitchen, she heard the family cat emit a blood-curdling yowl. She tore around
the corner into the living room where her son had pinned the pet down and was
trying his best to decapitate it with a toy wooden saw. After rescuing the
shaken feline, she demanded that Barre explain
himself. As it turned out, Sylvia herself was the inadvertent architect of this
murder-in-the-making. Barre insisted quite
matter-of-factly that he was doing nothing wrong. His mother, he said, had told
him a fairy tale in which the hero encountered a beast of some sort blocking his
way on a journey. When the monster rushed the hero, he cut off its head, but in
its place sprouted seven new, even fiercer heads. Barre
had merely been testing the process out on the cat. His belief in the magic of
folktales led him to see if he could become the only kid in the neighborhood
with a seven-headed cat. It surely had to work--because the folktale said it had.
Such incidents always made his mother wonder what manner of man her child would
become.

As he walked the streets of Springfield
in 1952, the teenaged Toelken happened upon two young
men clad in white shirts and black pants. Never one to shy away from interesting-looking
strangers, he stopped when the Elders thrust out their hands. They small-talked
their way through personal introductions and Toelken
was impressed by their openheartedness. A few weeks later, Toelken
and the Mormon missionaries met again, and they struck up more conversation.
Always interested in new cultures, Toelken admitted
he knew little about Mormonism, and he began to listen to the young men. He was
intrigued both by their message and by how enthusiastically they reminisced
about their home state of Utah
and the Intermountain West.

Toelken sensed that Springfield
would become for him only a dead-end town, and he knew
he wanted to try his hand at college somewhere. He had performed well in his
high-school biology class and his teacher convinced him that, with the right
education, he could end up working outside in nature rather than in the
dust-filled dimness and din of a local machine shop. He researched a bit, and encouraged
by the LDS missionaries’ recollections of Utah,
he settled on UtahStateAgriculturalCollege’s
renowned forestry program. By the autumn of 1953, young Toelken
was 2,000 miles from home in the mountain town of Logan
in northern Utah.

After
moving to the CacheValley
and asking a few more questions, Toelken’s interest
in Mormonism as a belief system flagged, but his love of the West only swelled.
True to his initial goals, he started out majoring in forestry but soon opted
for a University Studies major, a degree plan based in the HonorsCollege.
He now could enroll in anything that suited his fancy--and he did. He ended up
with a B.S. in English and German, eventually graduating in 1957. But before he
left USU, his life took an unexpected turn that would change him forever.

Along
with other whites and many Navajos, Toelken decided
to explore the deserts of southeastern Utah
as another young party to the Cold War uranium rush. While there, the
nineteen-year-old prospector contracted pneumonia in an out-of-the-way canyon
on the Navajo reservation. Delirious with fever, he collapsed. He awoke
disoriented and found himself lying in the center of a traditional hogan with a gray-haired man sitting at his head. The hogan was full of men and women, and the near-death Toelken was, he later realized, a fortunate participant in
a Navajo healing ceremony. He drifted off into feverish oblivion. After three
days of fitful half-sleep, he regained consciousness. When he awoke and looked
around with new color in his face and renewed light in his eyes, the medicine
men silently arose and went home. He was warm and safe in the Yellowman home. Yellowman’s wife
continued to nurse him back to health; somehow he knew that his life would forever
after be changed.

Toelken’s time among the Navajo
caught him off guard. Ambition for mineral discoveries receded into the
distance, but he wasn’t prepared for a different kind of wealth that he was
encountering. Amid a culture saturated with story, song, dance, art, and
especially humor, Toelken found himself enchanted
with his new family and their people. He was so impressed that he stayed on for
a while, recalling, in a 2003 interview, “these people
were poor--unimaginably poor.
They lived out in what we whites would call the middle of nowhere, but they
would give graciously and joyfully even to the point of their own hunger and
deprivation.” Such generosity dumbfounded the young Toelken;
he never forgot it and later incorporated it into his own way of life. The
Navajo were unlike any other people he’d ever known, yet he couldn’t remain
forever. He returned to Logan,
but much of him remained in southern Utah.

Toelken had planned to stay on
at USU to pursue a master’s degree, but his application was rejected by the
president of the university on grounds that he was “too dangerous to have
around influencing ‘impressionable undergraduates.’” His
crime? He had been the leader of an “unofficial and outlawed” student
organization called the Human Relations Society, which investigated and protested
against human injustice. It was the late 1950s, and USU was very homogeneous
culturally. Often, foreign students or those displaying various types of
“otherness” were dismissed from the university for
engaging in “troublesome activities,” and Toelken,
apparently, was a “troublemaker.”

When
WashingtonStateUniversity’s
English department head came to Utah,
he heard about Toelken’s situation and inquired about
it to USU President Chase. Dr. Buchanan wondered why a student as “colorful” as
Toelken could find no place in a USU graduate
program. Chase informed Buchanan that Toelken had
spoken and written animated diatribes against various administrative decisions
“that didn’t concern him” and that he was not welcome to spend additional time
on campus. In short, Toelken had embarrassed the
university. Professor Buchanan replied, “We may differ with our students on
various issues at WSU, but at least we can extend them the four freedoms. We’re
going to offer Mr. Toelken a fellowship.” This conversation
occurred without Toelken’s knowledge, but within a
few weeks he received a handwritten letter from the WSU president inviting him
to Pullman,
Washington.
Meanwhile Toelken had married Miiko
Kubota in 1957 in his former home of Springfield;
Miiko is Japanese-American, a native of Utah,
but interracial marriages were forbidden by law throughout the West until the
1960s.

Finishing his master’s degree, Toelken
followed a friend to the University of Oregon in Eugene, where he
started out studying American literature, specifically the humor of Thoreau. He
drifted into English literature, studying Chaucer mostly, and then discovered
what he thought would be his life’s work: ballads.

One year into his doctoral work, Visiting Professor Arthur G. Brodeur of Harvard arrived to teach at Oregon. Brodeur had inherited some of George Lyman Kittredge’s dual interests in early English literature and
the ballad, and Oregon’s department head quipped to Toelken
that someone had finally arrived who could examine him. Toelken
completed his Ph.D. in 1964 and moved on to teach at the University of Utah for two
years, after which the Toelkens moved back to Eugene where Toelken settled into a career as an academic folklorist.

Toelken admits that he spent much of his
academic life “catching up” on folkloristics, other
folklorists, and the various schools of thought in folklore theory. At first, he
engaged himself in teaching mostly medieval English literature but found himself more interested in literary connections to folklore.
From Beowulf to T.S. Eliot, he searched for and led his students through
examples of literature arising out of folklore. Toelken
confesses that he was always more captivated by what various cultural groups did
than by what scholarswrote
about them. Ironically, in all his schooling, Toelkennever took a folklore course.
When asked how he became a folklorist, he responded, “I always was. I always
sensed that knowing the customs and ways of people was important. I somehow
knew that even when I was a kid. Our family had singers on both sides, and I
grew up singing whaling and sea songs. I also came of age in a working
environment full of traditions, and since I had seen the [Quabbin]
valley disappear, I decided that I would always strive to commit to memory as
much of what was traditional and customary in any culture I encountered--before
the memories were all gone.”

One of the main reasons Toelken
had wanted to return to Utah
was to be nearer his adopted Navajo kin and to re-immerse himself in Utah’s
folklore, an interest that began with his first publication, in 1959, on “The
Ballad of the Mountain Meadows Massacre.” Still, through the 1960s, most of his
research focused on the ballad and on medieval literature. It wasn’t until
1969, with the publication of his pathbreaking “The
‘Pretty Languages’ of Yellowman: Genre, Mode, and
Texture in Navaho Coyote Narratives,” that Toelken
began incorporating his experiences with his Navajo family into a broad
analysis of the ways that language, storytelling, context, and performance are
linked to human culture and worldview. Toelken’s
commitment to understanding human behavior and the importance of its
contexts—in contradistinction to a reliance on texts alone—placed him in
alliance with those “Young Turks” who were developing the contextual or
performance approach to folklore studies at the universities of Pennsylvania
and Texas at Austin in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

These interests were
borne out in other publications with implications for folklore theory that
followed: “Folklore, Worldview, and Communication” in Folklore: Performance and Communication (1975); “The Performative Aspect of Northwest Superstition and Popular
Belief” (Northwest Folklore 4, 1985);
“Belief Performances Along the Pacific Northwest Coast” in By Land and By Sea: Studies in the Folklore of Work and Leisure (1985);
and a number of articles in German for European journals. Much of this thinking
about the performative nature of folklore was
distilled into an innovative interpretation of folklore in his introductory
text, The Dynamics of Folklore (1979, revised and expanded ed., 1996).
Instead of using the time-honored genre-centered approach to folklore, Toelken focused instead on process, enactment, and
performance in describing not only the materials or items of folklore but their
social and community contexts, the ways individuals enact them, and their
meanings to their performers and their communities.

Many of the same
concerns animate Toelken’s continued work with
ballads and with the folk traditions of Germany
and Japan.
Ghosts and the Japanese: Cultural Experience in Japanese Death Legends (co-written
with Michiko Iwasaka, 1994) goes beyond the typical
collection of tales to assess Japanese culture as it reveals itself through its
ghostlore. Similarly, Morning Dew and Roses:
Nuance, Metaphor, and Meaning in Folksong (1995) uses
ballad texts to assess their inhering cultural metaphors of significance.

The 1969 publication of
“The ‘Pretty Languages’ of Yellowman,” which appeared
first in the journal Genre and was then reprinted in Folklore Genres edited by Dan Ben-Amos, established Toelken’s place as a folklorist, one who was alert to the
potential insights of anthropology and linguistics as well as literature. It
also became the first in a series of
essays on Native American folklore, particularly Navajo myth, that have had
powerful implications for Toelken’s career and, more
broadly, the study of religion and culture. Toelken
followed up on this article with “Ma’iJołdloshi: Legendary Styles and Navaho Myth” (1971),
“Seeing with a Native Eye: How Many Sheep Will It Hold?” (1976), “The Demands
of Harmony: An Appreciation of Navajo Relations” (1977), “Poetic Retranslation
and the ‘Pretty Languages’ of Yellowman” (coauthored
with Tacheeni Scott, 1981), “The Moccasin Telegraph
and Other Improbabilities” (1995), and other articles. In each, Toelken has worked toward an ever-deeper understanding of
the dynamic complexities of language, myth, and worldview among a people who are
simultaneously neighbors and Utah
residents but who see the world from perspectives radically different from
those of European heritage.

More
importantly, Toelken’s series of essays, written over
nearly forty years, reflect his constant rethinking of his work and his
reevaluation of his place as collector, analyst, and interpreter. For example,
he has analyzed why he did not collect from women, and how contexts and his own
ideas about gender relations influenced his decisions and directed his
attention. Navajos are a matrilineal culture, yet in the process of his zealous
efforts to capture and preserve Navajo narrative culture, he recorded and
analyzed tales only the men
were telling. Even more ironic, when Toelken
collaborated with Tacheeni Scott, a young Navajo
scholar, and issued a corrective retraction of his earlier work in “Poetic
Retranslation and the ‘Pretty Languages’ of Yellowman”
(1981), the retraction had the effect of undermining work that other scholars
had based on the first essay. Scholarly reaction was mixed, ranging from uproar
to deliberate indifference. No one wanted to admit the reality of Toelken’s rethinking and its consequences for Navajo
scholarship. Well into the twenty-first century, the first article is still far
more widely cited than its successors.

Especially in his 1996
and 1998 articles, “From Entertainment to Realization” and “The Yellowman Tapes, 1966-1997,” and in a plenary address to
the American Folklore Society in 2003, Toelken
discussed frankly and openly the rethinking that has been part of his
scholarship and his life since his first experiences living with Navajo people.
He has become increasingly sensitive to and aware of Navajo beliefs regarding
the power of spoken language and the constant presence of death as reflected in
witchcraft, warnings, and other omens, and he eventually concluded that he
would limit both his collection and analysis of the Coyote tales that are central
in Navajo culture. In his 1987 article, “Life and Death in the Navajo Coyote
Tales,” he distinguished four levels of meaning for these narratives: those
that he calls entertainment (level I), moral worldview (II), medicine (III),
and witchcraft (IV). And he concluded:

Even if I reject [the
Navajo] warning that there is danger in deeper inquiry into the stories, for me
to actually do further work would necessitate a repudiation of Navajo beliefs
and values—treasures that I feel ought to be strengthened and nurtured by
folklore scholarship, not weakened, denigrated, or given away to curious onlookers.

Just
as a folklorist needs to know where to begin, so one needs to recognize where
to stop, and I have decided to stop here. My intention is to deal with Level IV
of the Navajo stories not at all, beyond acknowledging here that it exists and
that it is considered dangerous by those in whose world it functions. Level
III, while fascinating, involves such heavy implications for Level IV that I
think it should also be left alone by outsiders; the present essay is the
fullest statement I anticipate making on it. (pp. 399-400)

In
these respects, Toelken contrasts markedly with many
scholars, some of whom have urged him to collect and write about materials that
the Navajo consider sacred or not to be shared with outsiders or limited to
particular seasons of the year. He has said forthrightly that he has doubts
about journalists and anthropologists who advocate “quick fixes and fast
theories.” And, in “The Yellowman Tapes, 1996-1997,”
he recounts his decision to pack up and mail to the Yellowman
family his entire collection of tape recordings of Coyote stories, some thirty
years’ worth, knowing that they would be destroyed by the family because of the
potential dangers if the tapes were played in the wrong situation or at the
wrong time of year.

Perhaps the culmination
of his constant rethinking of his research into Native American cultures is
reflected in The Anguish of Snails:
Native American Folklore in the West (2003), which is both a restatement of
much of his previous research and another stage in the dynamic rethinking that
has characterized his work. Here he surveys the ways in which Native American
traditions are performed, with chapters on visual and material arts, dance,
story and song, humor, and modes of thought, with evidence drawn from a lifetime
of research in the Pacific Northwest,
the Southwest, and the Intermountain West.

Yet publication and
research are only a means to an end with Toelken. He
wants primarily to know people and their worldviews and ways of life more
fully. When queried, he freely admitted that his tenure as a scholar of Navajo
culture was purely accidental, though fortuitous for both Toelken
and those who know him and his work. Over the years, he said, “I have become
much less interested in lofty, ivy-covered, ivory tower folklore theory and
theoretical thinking (or unthinking), than in what I and others can learn from
other people by paying close attention to the people themselves. The kinds of
cultural expression people deem important enough to pass on among themselves
and to others is the kind of folklore I want to help cultures perpetuate and
preserve.”

Toelken
remains suspicious of any theory that is conceptualized as “the way that all
folklore works.” Such ideological frameworks may leave important aspects of
cultures completely out of consideration. Folklorists, according to Toelken, may be blinded by what they want to see,
rather than awakened by what is really there. He can only say as much
because he admits he learned that painful lesson personally. Moreover,
folklorists miss the boat when they select or mold lore to fit their
theoretical models. Toelken believes that such models
are important, but only as a basis for understanding. The center of his work
and his thinking is not in the texts but in the people:

Folklore is dynamic,
alive, variant, and persistent. Among folklorists, it might seem absurdly
elementary to reiterate, but the folklore should come first, the
literature second. The meat of our scholarship is in the lore itself, not in
the theory. From the Arctic
to Tierra del Fuego,
culture and worldview change with each tribe, and literary people are
tragically missing out, often choosing not to deal with the dizzying array of
cultural performance and meaning, so they work with theoretical models instead
of people. The more sad for them.

One
of the most important ways Toelken has influenced the
academic folklore community internationally as well as locally was through his
participation in and directorship of the annual Fife Folklore Conference at UtahStateUniversity.
Dating back to the late 1970s, the Fife Conference has brought alive local, regional, and international folklore for the CacheValley’s
residents and for visiting students and scholars (see chapter 25). Before attending
a Fife Conference, Toelken says, most of his students
“don’t realize the universality of folklore, let alone have an interest in
exploring it.” The long-term results and overall satisfaction he drew from putting
on the Fife Conference is the sense of a public much more cognizant about what
folklore is and the meanings it can have for them individually and communally. Toelken contends that because of the Fife Conference and USU’s outstanding folklore faculty, folklore has become increasingly
meaningful and visible in the area and in the state. Toelken
hopes that the USU program has, in his words, engendered the

true
spirit of folklore--namely, that it is ongoing, continual, always in flux. This
is the vibrant legacy of UtahStateUniversity’s
folklore program: that we teach people the excitement of a discipline (or
hobby) always new, always alive, always dynamic, and never definitive.
Our students have been awakened to the idea that folklore is constantly being
passed down and preserved all around them, and that cultural expression is worth
investigating intimately. They learn that folklore will at once always
persevere and always change.

Toelken would consider the
success of his students to be his most rewarding legacy. Working on four
continents, Toelken’s scholastic descendants have spread
out across the world with the idea that gleaning meaning from cultural
expression is important, indeed crucial in human history and human relations.
The list of his students is far too extensive to recount here, but it is
noteworthy that people came from all over the world on the occasion of his
sixtieth birthday, an occasion marked by the publication in his honor of Worldviews
and the American West: The Life of the Place Itself, edited by Polly
Stewart, Steve Siporin, C. W. Sullivan, and Suzi Jones. It is a dynamic and diverse collection of
essays that reflect Toelken’s personal and scholarly
influence. His affable accessibility has shaped how countless scholars approach
their students, their colleagues, and their scholarship.

Toelken has served extensively
in the cause of advancing folklore scholarship along with cultural, social, and
academic awareness, both locally and internationally. From 1968 to 1985, he
served as the curator of the Randall Mills Archives of Northwest Folklore at
the University
of Oregon.
During that period, he held other posts and positions as well. In 1979, he was
the director of the Montana Folklife Project for the AmericanFolklifeCenter
of the Library of Congress. From 1976 to 1979, he chaired the Folk Arts Panel
for the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1977-78, he was president of the
American Folklore Society, and he served as a member of the Society’s Executive
Board from 1971 to 1976 and again from 1991 to 1994. From 1987 to 1990, he
chaired the Board of Directors of the WesternFolklifeCenter.
On the national level, he was a congressional appointee to the Board of
Trustees for the AmericanFolklifeCenter,
co-chairing in 1988 and serving as chair in 1989. He has edited three prominent
folklore journals during his career: Northwest Folklore (1963-66), Journal
of American Folklore (1973-76), and Western Folklore (2002-04).

On
July 5, 2002,
Toelken sustained a massive stroke. He was at his
office in the Fife Folklore Archives when he suddenly became dizzy and
disoriented. He drove home, picked up Miiko, and
drove to the Logan
hospital where it took some time to diagnose the problem and its severity. By
the end of the first evening, Toelken could neither
speak nor move the right side of his body. He was, for all practical purposes,
paralyzed. So, too, were his family, friends, and the folklore community.
Luckily, Toelken didn’t believe that his condition
was permanent. He set his aim toward recovery and after many long months of
hospitalization and intense physical, occupational, and speech therapy, he picked
up his research and writing again and has continued to teach, even though he’s
technically retired.

Perhaps most miraculous and inspiring is
that in the midst of recovery, he managed to complete his magnum opus, The
Anguish of Snails, his
tribute to his many friends and adoptive families near and far. It is a work
reflective of fifty years of trial and error, of meeting, befriending, knowing,
and often losing Native American friends. Most importantly, it is an exhortation
to cultural sensitivity, as well as a source for speculation, discovery, and
insight.